trail would eventually lead us to the house. I think James wanted to confess his whole plot to us and then allow us to see him die. This way, he could take the rap for everything, you’d be cleared of all charges, and he’d be ‘dead.’ You could go to a country where no one would know him and finally, Julian, you would be reunited after all these years apart.”
Lydia wasn’t positive that she had it exactly right, but she was confident that all the elements were there. How had James recognized them? How had he known they would eventually come back to the house? These were questions for which she didn’t have answers. But she knew that she and Jeffrey were meant to hear his confession and see him die that night. Her gut told her this with cold certainty.
Looking now into Julian’s eyes, she could see that she had hit her target.
“Why did you decide to give in to him, Julian? You’d fought so hard to have a normal life. First with Tad, then, even when your mother begged you not to marry, you tried again with Richard.”
Julian sat stone-faced.
“You watched him kill Tad, didn’t you? Jetty heard you scream. What was it you said to him? ‘I never loved you. Not like that.’ But it wasn’t the truth, was it? You did love him. You were so afraid that your love for your twin was the unnatural love of the curse, the threat of which your mother tortured you with all your life. The thought repulsed you, terrified you, but you couldn’t help it. You loved him so much that even when you could have implicated him in Tad’s murder, you didn’t. Even when you might have gone to jail for a murder you didn’t commit, you didn’t implicate James.”
Lydia let silence fill the room.
“Your mother must have made you feel so sick, so dirty. How she must have punished and tortured you just to make you see how wrong it was. In her own way, just to save you from the curse she was so afraid of.”
Julian looked at her with surprise. Tears filled her eyes and trailed down her face.
“But it had been the same with her, hadn’t it? She loved her brother. And he killed Jack Proctor. What happened to Paul, Julian?”
Julian spoke for the first time.
“She killed him. He came for her again. After my father was dead and my brother sent away. She shot him dead. Even though she loved him, she killed him. I helped her bury the body behind the house. Then we left Haunted and never went back. She thought she’d ended it for us. She really believed that. Then James escaped.”
“Why didn’t she tell the police about him when Tad was murdered?”
“She loved him, too. He was her son, don’t forget. She thought I would be exonerated. If it looked like I might be convicted, she would have come forward. I promised her that I would never marry again. And she thought that was enough to keep him away. But I broke my word.”
“Why? Why would you take that risk?”
She shrugged and looked down in shame. “I was lonely. I was afraid. I felt him always right behind me, shadowing my life. Richard was strong, safe. And…” She paused. “I didn’t really love him. I thought it would be safe if I didn’t love him. But then I got pregnant. It was an accident, but I got pregnant with the twins. He came for me again. He wanted the twins.”
“When did you decide to give in?”
“I didn’t,” she said weakly. “He did this to my life. Now he’s dead. And we are finally free, Lola, Nathaniel, and I.”
“No, Julian. You ended your therapy with Dr. Barnes. You moved your family into this building with access to the tunnels beneath the street. You hired Geneva Stout.”
“I didn’t know who she was when I hired her. I hadn’t been to Haunted in over twenty years.”
“I don’t believe you, Julian. Maybe you were James’s victim once. But I believe you’re his accomplice now. Your breakdown… maybe it was real, maybe it was an act. But it seems like you helped him orchestrate all of this so you could look like the victim, so that he could take the rap and then fake his own death. I think you’re planning on meeting him in Switzerland.”
Everyone, Jeffrey, Ford, the other officers and the moving men, stood silently looking at Julian.
“Maybe Maura Hodge was right,” said Lydia. “She said, ‘The Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.’ ”
It happened so fast, Lydia barely knew what hit her. Julian went from the calm woman sitting before her to the demon Lydia had met once before at Payne Whitney. She lunged at Lydia like a wildcat and Lydia went staggering back toward the open window behind her with Julian at her throat. All Lydia could think was that the other woman’s strength was phenomenal, and try as she did she couldn’t pull herself from Julian’s grip. In the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Ford shouting as her waist hit the sill, Julian on top of her. Lydia felt the cold of the outside air and heard the street noise below her as she and Julian leaned out the window, the upper halves of their bodies dangling over a straight drop to the sidewalk. Somewhere on the street, a woman screamed.
“You won’t keep us apart,” Julian whispered fiercely. Lydia felt herself tip toward the ground, the sky tilting around her, the buildings dancing. And she felt an odd lightness as gravity pulled on her. She felt the fragile thread that connected her soul to her body stretch to the point of snapping and she wondered,
Things seemed to be happening so slowly as Lydia felt the balance shift from most of their weight being in the building to most of their weight being out. And in the next second, she felt her feet lift from the floor and her body tilt more steeply toward the ground. Julian must have felt it, too, because her expression morphed from malice to surprise and fear. She loosed her grip on Lydia’s throat. It was then that Lydia felt strong hands on her ankles. Julian’s body started to slip over hers. Lydia tried to hold on, but the momentum of Julian’s fall was too great. Julian flipped over her like an acrobat, Ford getting to the window a millisecond too late. There was a shocked silence among them, as Julian fell, her scream like a siren ending abruptly as she hit the sidewalk. It was a gruesome sound; everyone who heard it felt the shattering of bones. Screeching tires, the sound of metal on metal, yelling voices from the street below carried up and filled the room.
Jeffrey pulled Lydia in the rest of the way and she sank to the floor, feeling every nerve ending in her body pulse with the relief of mortal terror. He held on to her as she buried her head in his shoulder, taking in the scent of his skin, the strength of his muscles, the sound of his breath. She’d never been so glad to be alive.
chapter forty-four
The ferry ride was grim and it was a journey she made alone. Jeffrey thought she was having her run and then going on to Central Park West, visiting her doctor for an early morning follow-up visit after her laparoscopy. And she would do that today, as well. But later.
It was six-thirty and the sky was a flat dead gray. The air was cold, and coming off the water it was downright frigid, but Lydia stood at the bow away from the cargo and near the workers, who were bundled in layers and drinking coffee from thermoses. Hector approached her.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to be here if they didn’t have to be,” he said, his Dominican accent heavy.
Hector, the morgue worker she’d met the night Jed McIntyre died, had been true to his word when she called to ask where the city would bury him. When a week later she’d called again and offered him a thousand dollars cash to take her to his grave, he’d said, “Lady, are you nuts? Go back to your life.”
“That’s just it,” she’d told him. “I can’t do that until I’ve seen the grave.”
He’d reluctantly agreed and told her to meet him at City Island in the Bronx and that he’d take her over to Potter’s Field on Harts Island when he took over that day’s Jane and John Does. She stood and watched as twenty anonymous pine coffins, branded only with serial numbers, were loaded from a van onto the waiting ferry. An old priest stood by waiting and she wondered if he started every morning like this, watching as workers loaded the bodies of God’s forsaken children onto a boat that would take them to their unmarked graves. She wondered how it didn’t shake his faith. But she didn’t ask. She had her own faith to worry about.
